An overview of the use of infrared spectroscopy and chemometrics in authenticity and traceability of cereals

•Near and mid infrared are used to authenticate and trace several cereals.•Few reports were found to determine the geographical origin of grains.•Both NIR and MIR have a great potential to authenticate the origin of grains.

Although both near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and mid infrared (MIR) spectroscopy combined with multivariate data analysis (MVA) have been extensively used to measure chemical composition (e.g. protein, moisture, oil) in a wide number of grains few reports can be found on the use of this methods for varietal discrimination and traceability of cereals. In this overview applications of NIR spectroscopy and MIR spectroscopy combined with multivariate data methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to aid on the authentication and traceability of cereals are discussed.